Poetry by James Crowden

Extracts from a Year of the Artist Project - May 2001
THE BUS STOP POEMS
© James Crowden

POEM LINKS

BUS ROUTE

IF ONLY BUSES COULD TALK

BUS REFLECTIONS

ON THE MOVE

MAPPING THE BUS

WAKE UP ROUTINE

A BIRD IN THE HAND IS WORTH TWO ON THE BUS

GETTING THERE

TRAFFIC NOISE - CACOPHONY - URBAN SPRAWL

LONDON BUSMAN'S PRAYER

WESTCOUNTRY BUSMAN'S PRAYER

ODD BUS DEFINITIONS, QUIRKS ETC

These days most people have cars, families often have two cars or as they are now called, 'people carriers'. In the nineteenth century they devised not only railways but the omnibus, an extension of the stage coach. Many of our towns have grown up as stages on a much larger journey, say from London to Exeter or London to Bath & Bristol. And these have given us the A30 and the A4 which in turn have been superseded by the M3, the A303 and the M4 whose role is to specifically avoid towns...

When writing these poems I was conscious of the much larger journeys that were made in the past. I was aware of the journeys that people had made on buses as children maybe fifty or even seventy years ago, when buses were far more important as a means of community transport. I was also aware, having made long bus journeys in places such as Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and India, of the potential over many days or even months for the journey to take on a kind of mystical meditative role, where your mind unlocks itself and the route becomes an inner route and the passing landscape feeds off your inner thoughts which then address the deeper and more interesting issues of being alive. Maybe it is no coincidence that Sufis regarded real travelling as an education in itself.

Also I have treated the bus as a living cosmos with thoughts and feelings of its own and at one point imagined all the various bus queues and passengers as a wide range of colourful birds chattering. The unpredictability of each journey appealed to me and it seemed that each journey had the potential to become something else. I remember very fondly the market bus which came into Shaftesbury on a Thursday once a week and Cecil the old hurdlemaker from Ashmore would give a running commentary all the way back. "We are now flying at six hundred feet, Ladies please fasten all seat belts etc..etc ."

The car is not everything and by being enclosed in its shell and spending all day in front of computer screens we are denying ourselves some of the richer and more communal aspects of living. There is after all no first and second class on a bus, only upstairs and downstairs...